The Moment: In a game with 6 home runs, which home run was the most influential? It was Miguel Sano’s moon shot, with travelled over the batter’s eye in center field and into someone’s dinner at Catch. The most impactful Dinger of the game was also the biggest bomb of the day.
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The Hero: Ervin Santana needs a little bit of credit. This was his worst outing of the year, and al he did was work 6 innings, striking out 7 and allowing 0 runs. Pedestrian.
The Goat: Sonny Gray made his return to the mound for Oakland, at it is pretty apparent that he has a little ways to go to be all the way back. He gave up 3 of Minnesota’s home runs (Cesar Valdez gave up the other 3), though to his credit, he was still able to go 6 innings. It’s just that when the Twins made contact, it was really good contact.
The Soundtrack: Hotel California – The Eagles – Dedicated to the memory of the Oakland A’s.
The Story: The Twins hit a whole bunch of home runs last night. There were 6 of them to be exact, two from Brian Dozier, one that could count as 2 for Miguel Sano, one for Jason Castro, another for Byron Buxton and finally, one for Joe Mauer. That’s like, every offseason story line wrapped up in one offensive outburst.
To get an idea how the homers worked, look at the video description of each of them on MLB.com. “Dozier Smashes a home run” “Sano Belts ball” “Castro launches home run” “Buxton Mashes homer” “Dozier crushes his second homer” “Mauer sprays homer”. Five of the home runs were pretty impressive. Mauer’s just kind of barely got over the fence. Don’t get me wrong, an opposite field home run takes a great deal of strength, and is very impressive, but in this game, there were 5 home runs that went much further.
Sano’s blast, as you see above, was the most impressive. Jason Castro bounced one off the batter’s eye, which is also really impressive, and I am not sure I have ever seen that before either (though Yonder Alonso did that in the top of the 9th). Buxton’s home run ended up in the upper deck in left field. There was some serious distance to the Twins’ hits last night.
Not only did the Twins put together a game in which they executed with runners on, and got solid pitching along the way, but the two players that had been struggling the most this year, Byron Buxton and Joe Mauer hit their first home runs of the season. Heck, even Danny Santana came in and doubled in a pinch hit opportunity. Either the Twins have finally figured something out, or they really wanted to show off for Trevor Plouffe in his return to Target Field.
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